Poetry is always valued in times of crisis
Below you’ll find the latest pandemic poems and some historical greats, as well as some more contemporary classics nominated by the Poetry and Covid Team.
‘In the beginning the sky weighed down on the earth in a thick, black fog which trapped the prostrating heat in a blanket of clouds; and throughout the time that it took four moons to wax and to wane, the south winds blew with their sweltering currents of toxic air.’
Ovid, Metamorphoses
What I Know
By Anne Taylor
That it’s hard not to take it personally when people avoid you like the plague. That a word, or a smile, or saying hello with your eyes can make all the difference.
Two Poems
By Jessica Jost-Costanzo
They are just little white marks on the scan, and they are floating shapes that make me think of clouds— clouds that look like funny things, cute things.
Two Poems
By Tina Cole
I am a dot on the face of this page a white wilderness diary boxed in by dates with no purpose it is new year in May it is new year in June the page edges boundary a redundancy
Pas De Pandemic
By Molly Headley
tomber / pas de bourrée / glissade / jeté fall down / stumble like a drunk / glide/ throw it away
Three Poems
By María Castro Domínguez
I dreamt you were the only one in your house, a few months after that I saw all the world and all its people laughing, a party was going on in a fast food restaurant a birthday cake was divided into portions, there was more than enough for everyone.
Elemental
By Kerri Simpson
Fire asserted its destructive power. Rivers choked. Mankind prayed. Forgive us our reckless ways. Rain came. Cathartic tears to wash away the flame and extinguish our fears.
Three Poems
By Linda Cosgriff
How do you count the cost of the worldwide Covid-19 toll? Begin digging the first hole.
Covid-19
By Rani Drew
The Globe is vibrating with the Coronavirus. Has there ever been such a threat to human life? Yet now unseen and unknown it is overtaking the planet.
If 2020 is the Year we Will Hate Forever I can Honestly Say I saw it Coming
By Wallace Lane
I do not need to hear the world is ending to know that the thrill of something good is no more.
Three Poems
By Stephanie Powell
pausing at street corners to see if my flesh becomes brick. Shin bones straight like streetlamps- face lit only by phone-screen light.
Four Poems
By Bernard Horn
Consider your so-called life, that is, if your hemming and hawing between stolen life and pre-life, stolen life and pre-life can be dignified by that term. Sure, there are adjectives we living beings are driven to apply to you: rapacious, single-minded, flexible, dogged, but that’s just how we are, driven to deny…
Three Poems
By Mark Cassidy
In sanctuary of an unlatched porch I’ve laid my cycle down. The door is thick-strong oak: long hinges brace nail-studded beams, an iron ring for handle.
Three Poems
By R. G. Jodah
You can hear the rumpus rumbling all the way from aisle four where some heavyweight contenders are arguing the score. The champ has got a trolley-full, her challenger sod all. They’re going at it toe-to-toe. The writing’s on the wall
Three Poems
By Frank William Finney
Sitting in the bleachers of a raucous rally, we listen as they pack our old suitcase with wrinkled shirts and holey socks A week’s worth of laundry that stinks up the room.
Two Poems
By Daniel Hinds
On the first day of lockdown, I stopped my watch And hung it on my writing desk. To slip beneath the wrinkles of Time’s face And sleep within the sandy trench. I hope I will wake.
Three Poems
By Paul Francis
The way it’s supposed to work is this: she goes into the trenches, fights disease and thanks to her and others folk get well. This isn’t Disney. There are some they lose. The odds are, mostly, reasonable.
Portal
By J. C. Niala
As we attuned to lockdown we forgot how life had once worked, our soundtrack gone like an interrupted livestream.
Afternoon Walk
By Tina Cathleen MacNaughton
I note, not without bitterness, that this sadly says it all. As if a rectangle of blue plastic with strings and a squirt of antiseptic was ever going to be enough.
Pandemic Panorama
By Amanda Jones
My pandemic panorama Produces a plethora of play. Inside my cage of drama Comes a theatre each day.
At the Twenty Four Hour Crematorium
By Linda Casper
In towns like Delhi, to deal with the pandemic at its height Crematoria work all day and night Wrapped in shrouds, ready to burn, maybe with flowers draped on top Bodies of loved ones are brought here non-stop
April 2020
By Susan M Evans
Attention must be paid on the early morning walk: to the steady eye of the rising sun, red, bloated, emerging from the sea. To the pale green ghost of the super moon, in perfect opposition; taking reluctant leave.
Two Poems
By Rosy Wood-Bevan
I am no super-hero I fly with neither cape nor angel wings, nor sport a hollow halo. I must dive without gills or fins, spluttering under, a broken snorkel. Here, where no-one can breathe, only machines sigh monotonously in the swimming light.
Love Letter
By Paula Moore
This is a love letter to everyone who did not remodel the bathroom, learn a new language, or write a book during the pandemic. To everyone who wants to hold on to the lessons learned but is just trying to hold it together. To everyone who met the loneliness and loss sometimes…
Learning Curve
By Judith Mendoza-White
2020 rollercoasters on twos and zeros insolent with power. It frets in graphs of lives and deaths, of fear in curves that must be flattened, in figments of plans delayed to a future hollow with maybes, betrayed by frozen hours pulsating with religious or pagan zeal with gods surprised
What New Forms
By Andrea Holland
What is an event like this (and this) (and this) (and this)? What new forms of drama (all of the drama is happening)
Two Poems
By Mark Kirkbride
Beyond the wheat fields, a city plots a staircase against the sky or a graph, its windows on fire in the sun’s rich rays, each distinct as if up close in fever dreams
Ibis
By Maggie Sawkins
This is what I heard: you are holed up in a hotel named after one of the first birds
Pandemic
By Preeti Kailey
scream, thrall, football is coming home home to a country with blood red stripes that run like veins through our bodies
A Walk in the Park
By Charlie Hill
And so, walking jumpily through the park where I had once played drinking games with miscreants and unnamed Polish spirits – in joyous violation of arcane mores and public health advice
Two Poems
By John M. Heavey
This feather-light, pleated mask, blue as a summer day, familiar as underwear, could be a parasail for crickets, a beach cabana for mice.
Two Covid Limericks
By Terry Marter
A vaccine, we all know’s the real trick To prevent one and all getting sick. Anti-vax minds are cold to the facts that we’re told. Either way all it takes is one Prick!
Two Poems
By Stuart McFarlane
Bacteria, they say, are alive. Coronavirus, they say, is alive and, yet, not alive.
Lockdown
By Joanna Wakefield
First, travel was restricted and we kept the home fires burning, Then the planes stopped flying and rested on the tarmac Like big white gulls waiting for fish to return.
Three Poems
By Guinevere Clark
talk under its unshakeable shade, about years. Thousands of them – graveyard statues in late sun.
Two Poems
By Helen Deal
You’re on a beach for your birthday, a yawning, yellow Cornish beach with picnic tables set like teeth in the sand. A beach with unsnagged sky curving over the headland, though I imagine the glass-sharp April air must be flaying your flesh.
Three Poems
By Emma Purshouse
She walks them round the confines of the yard. Lap…..after lap……after lap……after lap….. after lap. Day after day. But it’s so hard she has to admit, keeping it all intact
Pentre Village
By Phil Wood
The driest May and fear of drought and virus, that smear of honeydew, and sallow leaves. Our wish list idles in a camping van.
Three Poems
By Kathy Gee
That microscopic viral burst that started everything: an exponential surge of matter, forming and reforming, spreading outwards at the speed of travel plans.
Two Poems
By Nancy Huggett
We have come for the cherry blossoms. It is spring. And a pandemic. And we wander each evening looking for signs that this languishing is really a disguise for the liminal.
Poem
By Madeleine Begun Kane
Manhattan’s begun to reopen; Just in time, cuz we barely are copin’. Cabin fever’s widespread. Are our fav nightspots dead? Can we still get great food there? Here’s hopin’!
Three Poems
By Adrienne Stevenson
day by day the data mounts raw figures accumulate this many cases, that many deaths even more undetected wander through masked gatherings adding their breath to the clouds of vaporous viral particles
Three Poems
By Steve Pottinger
more uncomfortable than ever this wasn’t how she imagined life would be and she curses her luck, the virus, this new normal where shops not clubs have bouncers on the door everyone hitting the dance-floor in the canned veg aisle to a soundtrack of our colleagues are working hard in difficult circumstances…
Round the Ring
By Julie Cameron
Frost on the drive, glistening in the morning sunlight Ding-a-ding-a, phone alert, rippling up a chord. The postman on his round. I spot him on my screen. The post clatters through my letter box.
Two Poems
By Evon Wheeler
I hadn’t know loneliness until a stranger said hello for months now, I’m met with averted eyes, people swiftly crossing the road, to avoid all human contact. empty blue hands line bleak pavements, as tendril arms grab forward, the weeds are taking over a smile, disguised behind a masked face, muffling their…
Coronologue II: Vaccine Rising
By Rajan Sharma
Millions of people have now had it done, starting With those who were high risk, including my mum; At her booked appointment she rolled up her sleeve Quick jab, then a rest, and then she could leave;
Three Poems
By Ilse Pedler
We divided our days into coins for the new Government approved slot machine rationing them one by one; a coin for our one form of exercise a day, a coin for shopping for basic necessities, a coin for let’s bake some bread!
The Walk
By Genevieve Luyimbazi
After, the 14 days isolation, Today I walked, My Mom, My Dad We walked for fresh air, we walked for fitness. We walked away from boredom at home.
Three Poems
By Roy Bainton
The April sun’s out Determined to pierce winter’s Dogged hanging-on Commanding me to write Something cheerful.
Two Poems
By Arthur Allen
All spring death strikes where it wants like something effortless and without human delay transmitted into effect the edict: die and across the world it was obeyed.
Subtidal Channels
By Graham Palmer
by the unsure foreshore of future Frindsbury we collapsed slowly into the wine and blasted chalk worshipping the hours we had lost
New Year: Discharged
By Wes Lee
The neighbour’s dog barks into the wind for the boy who is never there. On the porch, tethered to its red kennel, it eyes the world, barks with its full life-force. An eyelash drifts down from the skylight. Each day, fresh things fall to grace.
Two Poems
By Anneka Chambers
the world lays limp, its axis broken. i swerve the contour of weakened frames. faces-chained-to-tension bodies-fixed-in-shock.
Three Poems
By Alex Alec-Smith
Down the sun baked path, past the defunct quarry with its burnt out cars to the railway line. A labyrinth of bushes that catch at my hair, nettles knee high stinging through my jeans as I follow the faint trace of deer.
Two Poems
By Kathleen Bryson
You can choose not to see the posters or the placards as you hide in situ take vitamin D tablets And even if you deny it you can hear the domestics pandemic sirens all night long some hands slopping together on Thursday nights
Two Poems
By Ann D Stevenson
Intimidation, pontification, stay in location, no integration, no vacation, no celebration, just segregation and separation.
The Prince Rambles
By Juan Gomez
Father has been rummaging, fidgeting through the house for lack of work, and I can’t help but wonder: what brittle castles are our clockwork systems, so easily distraught by slightest pause.
Waiting to Exhale
By Mehreen Hamdany
In measured breaths I count the days In wary inhale Of air and dust
Three Poems
By Hannah Linden
The world is playing into boxes we open like guilty secrets in the clang of our private spaces. Maybe we should pay a fear-fee for the release we feel, so we bless the senders with surprise emoticons.
Three Poems
By Christopher
On the path outside the Highgate pearly gate I stood and rattled chains, tried to enter, saw That sign, again, ‘closed…’, I’ll have to wait There’s no-one here, all furloughed, off to war
Three Poems
By Doug Sandle
Their work is done, the pestilence and pandemic has finished, the drumbeats of death stilled, and the apocalyptic detritus of destruction cleared. They came determined, though not swiftly charging on horses, but meticulously and mechanically on old tractors, mocking our new technologies.
Haikus in the Time of Covid-19
By Pauline Hall
Thinking of their faces beautifying my own now ready to Zoom.
Sonnet for Now
By Lena Mattheis
I often think about our space these days: The world I touch has now become so small. I think about how much we can erase And lay skin-covered fingers on my wall…
Dawn
By Yuu Ikeda
My brain draws dawn that I saw with you The dawn was hope that I could run toward new colors The dawn was hope that I could swim even in despairing desert
Pandemic Tanka
By Rose Menyon Heflin
Echoing laughter The bus stop across the street People are waiting Giggling through the pain and fear Discussing the new normal
Three Poems
By Meiling Cheng
Once upon a time, there were dinosaurs. They roamed the Earth as giants. They ate everything, from vegetations to dragonflies, from gazelles to tigers, to mineral deposits in hard rocks, to their own babies. They combated each other for sports. They wrestled with the pre-Olympian Titans. They threatened to dinosaurize the million…
How Not to Get Corona
By Matt Travers and Manolis Kapazoglou
Matt Travers is a writer and translator based in Aarhus, Denmark, whose recent work can be found in 3:AM Magazine, Zarf Poetry, Overground Underground, Firmament, Asymptote and Tripwire Journal. He is currently working on the English translation of Søren Fauth’s ‘Moloch: The Story Of My Rage’.
COVID 19, December 11th, 2020
By Gary King
A man in the ICU puffed out before his final breath: I know I’m about to die but no way in Hell it’s from Covid.
Two Poems
By Gwendolyn Soper
Ninety-four Google Chrome tabs line up across the top of my screen. My eyes caress them – I cling to each one. They reveal my pre-pandemic life. If the tabs are gone those parts may be forgotten.
My Impending Adventure, A Story for Another Day
By Naikaali Irene Ssentongo
Walking down a lonely path with no one to hold nor kiss goodbye. The oxygen mask gives me the calm assurance that all will be well soon.
Covid Winter
By Clive Reed
How much like winter has this illness been? The icy blast that caught us unaware And kept us locked inside a fortnight long, As danger lurked beneath its icy stare.
Corona Virus My Sacred Teacher
By Matthew Gerald Mugerwa
If I were to take the road ‘less travelled’, I would choose you Corona Virus as my travel companion.
You Burned Us Day and Night
By Ranjith Sivaraman
Are you a natural selection or invention? If natural selection, I have nothing to say, And if you are invented, let the ‘splendour of thousands of suns,’ Blaze upon the heads of your inventors.
Two Poems
By Ruchi Singh
Who named you corona? This word comes from the ‘crown’ The crown is preserver
Three Poems
By Anna Cates
Spring 2020. No effervescent sparkles beside the fireplace. No wine glasses clinking. No strains from a violin. Only our “great adaptation,” this social distancing . . .
Three Poems
By MJ Wetherman White
We’ve been cooped up here for months, just me and the dog, the two of us sad, lonesome for the lost world we conjured
Shoot Me!
By Sabine Schwaebisch
Pain takes over. We call it ‘holistic’. Or ‘terminal agitation’, medically put.
Eve of Change
By Ed Davis
All falls down now that it’s autumn: leaves, acorns, kings and kingdoms, children of God.
On Patience While Sheltering At Home
By Debra Williamson
Patience is a muscle now a pause that flexes with intention: I heard it in the cardinal’s seven wordless syllables, calling.
Flatline
By Megha Anne Wilson
I have so much to speak. So many words that stammer, pause and tell in my head waiting to jut out of my mouth, onto my hand through the pen onto the page or screen.
Three Poems
By Rita Coleman
I can take it. I’ve been around the sun a few times. Go ahead, tell me all about the deaths, tell me how they died without caress in the slipstream between breath and silence a video call of last words.
Three Poems
By Louise Longson
The Welsh Lords are turning in their graves. The shades of Llewelyn, Cadwaladr and Glyn Dŵr haunt the ghost town. All boundaries are closed. Once it took twelve feet of earth to keep us in, them out. No-one comes now.
Nineteen Lines on Covid-19
By David Lee Garrison
It sneaks up behind you and spits on your neck, it sleeps with you, storms into your dreams.
Two Poems
By Judy Johnson
No need to decorate, just two of us and the dog, who doesn’t mind. Our daughter’s a nurse, so grandkids can’t come— and all those signs heroes work here don’t translate into a raise.
Boxes
By Jack Nahmod
I’ll miss the warm embrace on my face, the no excuse for losing touch while losing touch; when negative was positive, though positive was negative.
Two Poems
By Isabelle Ward
Tokyo shudders. I lean out the window, three people in a room behind me which has not changed but to more stubbornly not fit with the changing city around it, and watch the cherry blossoms cry onto the river below. With this time of new beginnings
Four Poems
By Sulabh Kumar Shrestha
My capricious little genome Walking through your ribosomes Millions of crowned copies Commandeering your body A violent storm of cytokine Blindly destroying everything…
Headline: COVID Dead Buried in Potter’s Field, New York
By David Newkirk
the echoes reverberate as they dream of dancing through the field their bodies covered in flowers.
Missing You in Lockdown
By Linda Hibbin
Empty bench, No one is there. I see you though, Running fingers through your hair.
Three Poems
By Annette Gagliardi
We ate the last of the peanut butter yesterday. I used up the Almond milk on half-cup of Harvest Bakery granola, which wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be, so, there won’t be hot cocoa tomorrow, or pancakes for that matter: no eggs, no sugar, no batter mix.
Sweet and Sour
By Genevieve Soriano Aguinaldo
bank tellers become priests holding confession in plastic asking how much do we owe or how much do we need
COVID-19: New Rules!
By Gary Weston
Follow rules of social distance It’s the path of most resistance Stay at least six feet away Don’t let others come your way
The Streetwalker
By Erica Hutchinson
I walk alone in the middle
Avoiding close encounters of all kinds
Longing for a safety net of any kind
And a return to the narrow normalcy of sidewalks
…that may never be
Cleaning in the Time of Covid
By Stella Ling
Cleaning the house with zeal of pornographic lust, “Out, out damned spot!” was my credo against the dust.
Two Poems
By Cchristy White
Who have you missed in this time of isolation, of masks and distance? Whose face did you dream as the nights alone resembled days without the touch of another?
Three Poems
By Heidi Greco
These days of no-contact, no touching, no hugs we’ve been banned from even squeezing the produce. Instead, we must eyeball each piled-up display arranged by masked workers in the quiet of night.
It is the Time
By Albino Carrillo
It is the time It is the time of Gathering bags Of dog food & weed
Two Poems
By Sue Matin
The 09.37 rattles in to a cathedral of echoes an arc of pigeons swoop through the inside outside
Pandemic Easter
By Herbert Woodward Martin
The cathedral is empty; the tomb is bare from the body That occupied it from that tragic Friday no one envisioned Emptiness as its own pain, brain wondering about loss Who is responsible for this disturbance
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About Us
Poetry and Covid is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, aiming to share poems and spark discussion around poetry and pandemics.
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